Evil Speech: Worse than You Think

Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim

Maimonides teaches [1] that murder, idolatry and adultery meet with punishment on Earth, and loss of the afterlife. He adds that Lashon Hara is worse than these 3 sins. This lesson is derived as follows. The word “great” is associated with murder, idolatry and adultery, while “many greatnesses” is associated with Lashon Hara. Rabbi Chait taught as follows:

Each of the three cardinal sins are called “great” (gadol). Regarding idolatry, Moshe said of the Jews’ Golden Calf, “The people sinned a great sin” (Exod. 32:31). Regarding adultery, Joseph refused to sleep with Potiphar’s wife saying, “How can I commit this great evil?” (Gen. 39:9) And regarding murder, Cain said of God’s punishment of banishment for killing his brother Abel, “My sin is greater than I can bear” (Gen. 4:13). But regarding Lashon Hara, the verse says, “Mouths that speak many great things” (Psalms 12:4), using the plural and not the singular, as the three sins above. This indicates that Lashon Hara includes all the “many greatnesses” of the three cardinal sins. How precisely does Lashon Hara correspond to these sins?

Lashon Hara distorts reality, similar to idolatry’s distortion of what God is. We also understand that Lashon Hara contains an element of murder (character assassination). But how is it similar to adultery? Man sins in two ways. One is an unbridled and open instinctual expression. Examples of this first category are adultery and murder. But man also sins in a second manner, through sublimation in speech. One would assume the raw expression is worse. In one sense this is true. But in another sense, the sublimated expression is worse in that one can’t extricate oneself: the attachment is stronger—it is constant and it prevents one from change.

Why is Lashon Hara the one sin to which God responds with a miraculous plague of tzaraas afflicting the gossiper? Lashon Hara is heresy, as Psalms 12 teaches: “With our speech we will become great, our lips are our own, who can rule over us?!” Rejecting a ruler (God) over oneself, one denies God. Pharaoh’s astrologers too claimed superior status. They received boils they could not remove [2]. Gossipers receive a skin disease. Both cases teach the sinner that their rejection of God is false, through God overpowering their bodies and correcting their misconceptions. Denial of God demands God to show conclusively, He is the lone power that exists. God does so by delivering tzaraas to the gossiper and the astrologers. He is the sole power in the universe. Nothing else exists. 

Atonement for Lashon Hara requires the sinner to take two birds, cedar and hyssop. He kills one bird and then takes the living bird with the cedar and hyssop tied with red string, and dips them all in the dead bird's blood and then releases the living bird over an open field. This is not barbarism. On the contrary, it is to teach the sinner of the irretrievable evil that he spread. Just as the bloody bird once released, will never be caught again, the sinner’s “bloody speech” (character assassination) is irretrievable. Stolen money can be returned. But one cannot retract the spoken word. This visual helps impact the sinner with a more tangible sense of the irrevocable damage he inflicted with his words. 

Now, after this bird rite, what still lacks in the gossiper that more is still needed, as we see the priest placed blood and oil on his right ear, right thumb and right and big toe? Furthermore, what is the gossiper’s commonality with the priest’s inauguration, for they too had blood placed on their right ears, right thumbs and right big toes? The only difference is, unlike the gossiper, the priests were not anointed with oil in these 3 locations; blood alone was placed there. 

Both the gossiper and the priests require a focus on God. The priest is obvious, as he serviced God in temple, a service which cannot be mindless. Sacrifice too requires proper knowledge of God and intellectual acceptance of how to perform the sacrifice and when and where to eat it. The gossiper also requires a focus on God, a return to God from his heresy. It’s insufficient to only see your error through the bloodied bird, you must also return to God: “If a person transgresses any of the mitzvot of the Torah, whether a positive command or a negative command—whether willingly or inadvertently—when he repents, and returns from his sin, he must confess before God”[3]. So they both receive animal’s blood in place off their own blood. There must be no disconnect between what they hear in Torah (ear), and how they act (thumb, toe). 

Evil speech is worse than you think. And one also forfeits his afterlife by committing this grave sin. 

[1] Hilchos Dayos 7:3

[2] Exod. 9:11

[3] Hilchos Teshuva 1:1